Ingmar Bergman's unique international status as a filmmaker would seem assured on many grounds.
Along with Sj?str?m, Stiller, and Bergman, Sj?berg must be counted as one of the most significant directors of the Swedish cinema, and indeed as the most important in that long period between the departure of Sj?str?m and Stiller for Hollywood and the establishment of Bergman as a mature talent. However, it is hard not to agree with the judgement of Peter Cowie when he states that Sj?berg "is hampered by a want of thematic drive, for he is not preoccupied, like Bergman, with a personal vision.
With a career in film that in many ways paralleled that of his close friend Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sj?str?m entered the Swedish film industry at virtually the same time (1912), primarily as an actor, only to become almost immediately, like Stiller, a film director. Whereas Stiller had spent his youth in Finland, Sj?str?m had spent six formative years as a child in America's Brooklyn. Once back in Sweden after an unhappy childhood, his training for the theater proved fruitful. He became a well-established actor before entering the film industry at the age of thirty-two.
Swedish filmmaker Marianne Ahrne?who is also an accomplished novelist and journalist?began her film career as an actress at the Student Theater at the University of Lund, following that with stints at the Th??tre des Carmes in Avignon, France, and the experimental theater Odinteatret in Denmark. She entered the Stockholm Film School in 1967 to study acting, but by 1970 she had begun directing, initially making documentaries for Swedish and Italian television. Although Ahrne dislikes being considered a ?woman filmmaker? with its limiting connotations, her films have often focused on ?women?s
Trained as a painter and lithographer, currently working in a variety of media but not film, Gunvor Nelson describes herself as an artist rather than as a director. Her films have been widely screened in festivals and one-woman shows around the United States and Europe. Marked by engagements with surrealist and personal avant-garde film, they all, though differently, meld attention to color, light, shape, form, and texture with a keen sense of rhythm and time. Emotion and mood predominate: although careful choreography, always of images and frequently also of sound, underpins her individual
